An American worker coming off the three-day Labor Day holiday, the traditional end of the summer vacation season and the last official holiday for many weeks to come, will probably not feel well-rested. The United States is the world’s only “advanced” nation that does not require employers to give workers paid vacation, not a single day of it. In that unhappy land of Scrooge-meets-von Hayek, employers grant workers paid time off as part of an incentives-and-benefits package. For their parts, workers, fearful of their jobs in a time of economic uncertainty, usually do not take the time they’re offered; by one recent estimate, only 14 percent of them take two weeks off at a time, as was customary only a generation ago, back when something approaching the social contract was in place.

One argument for the short shrift American workers get when it comes to vacations is that that’s what keeps the American economy the most productive in the world. That argument, however, is faulty. According to the World Economic Forum, the United States came in fourth in the rankings of the world’s most competitive economies. That figure is reached by many complex factors, but for our purposes it’s enough to note that Sweden, which ranks second, offers its workers five weeks of paid vacation—not necessarily out of any niceness on the part of the capitalists, but by law.

Now, it’s possible to interpret the Swedish workers’ productivity as being the result of other measures, most on the satisfaction and well-being scale: for one thing, they’re paid much more than American workers, and even if half of their pay goes to taxes, very few people in Sweden seem to mind. What does seem certain is that having five weeks of paid vacation (plus another couple of weeks’ worth of government holidays) doesn’t seem to hinder a Swede’s ability to put nose to grindstone during the time he or she is on the job.

Germany, which doesn’t often figure when American pundits and politicians decry the evils of socialism (for that they pick France, which is actually a little less generous in several social-welfare measures), similarly requires that all workers receive at least four weeks of paid vacation annually. In reality, most German workers enjoy anywhere between five and seven weeks off, plus federal holidays, and enjoy a higher standard of living by most measures than do their American peers. Put in economic terms, while the usual assumptions of competitive advantage would suggest that more time at workstation, desk, and wheel equates to more dollars generated, something is at work to negate that notion, and that something would seem to lie in the ineffable—or barely effable, anyway—realm of happiness.

If Italians, say, work in order to live, in other words, then Americans would seem to live in order to work. Perhaps they even work in order to work.

If you’d like to check the statistics, have a look at, for example, this report from the Harvard Law School and this chart drawing on OECD data. If you’re inclined to think that if it’s not an enumerated power in the Constitution then the government has no business in it, then you may not care to hear any contrary argument, but others might well be inclined to think that that “pursuit of happiness” business so carefully evoked in another founding document could just have some bearing on the matter.

It can perhaps be argued as well that American workers get their full complement of vacation time early in life, for, as a report in The Economist puts it, American children “have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries.” Traditionally, American schools are closed for three months in summer, which has well-observed effects, one of which is that American students have to spend a good part of the following year playing catch-up to recover all the learning they’ve forgotten (three months’ worth of mathematics alone, by most measures). Primary and secondary schools elsewhere in the world have far longer hours—60 per week in Sweden, nearly twice as many as in the United States—distributed more evenly over the year.

Many of the American public school systems that can afford to do so—which are few, thanks to the current mania for defunding public education—have been adapting to the rest of the world’s calendar. Many charter schools have already taken to longer hours, some running from 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning until 5:00 in the afternoon.

But will those extended hours be given back to Americans later in life, come vacation time? If current measures are any indication, then the answer is a resounding no.